Shares

Look. I like Conan. If stories let us play out our secret fantasies in widescreen technicolor, then clearly there’s a part of me that longs to be a muscular barbarian, crushing my enemies and hearing the lamentation of their women. While Robert E Howard’s original Conan stories aren’t quite as good as the epic John Milius/Oliver Stone movie that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger to superstardom, they are still gems of pulp fiction
well worth reading.

Conan’s rippling pectorals have proved a suitable fantasy vehicle for generations of geek boys, but the macho white male is only the fantasy ideal for a minority. As Lisa Cron argues in her excellent
Wired For Story, the power of story reaches far further than mere entertainment. Our brain thinks in stories, but when stories don’t reflect our lived experience and our sense of identity, our brain will often reject them.

The children’s author’s sixth novel has become the first YA work to win the top prize for best fantasy novel, as female writers led the charge at FantasyCon 2015

Read more

Seth Dickinson is one of a growing movement of fantasy authors re-engineering older stories for readers who don’t see themselves reflected in Conan, Frodo Baggins or Luke Skywalker. The Traitor Baru Cormorant begins with one of fantasy’s most famous tropes, the hero’s tribe are conquered by an oppressive empire, and he must take revenge. Or, as in the case of Ms Cormorant, she. And how will Baru Cormorant bring down the empire that murdered one of her two fathers? By learning to swing a sword? No! But by becoming a civil servant.

There’s a clear logic to the conceit at the heart of Dickinson’s novel. Lone barbarians, however ripped, don’t defeat armies. But politicians and bureaucrats can wield the power to topple empires. Baru Cormorant is a woman, from a conquered people, who discovers she is attracted to other women, trapped in an empire that kills her kind. Her only chance to survive is to learn the Masquerade of lies and deception that power the empire, and beat it at its own game. Dickinson’s novel arguably pursues the same strategy as its protagonist, imitating the genre it seeks to subvert, and perhaps one day, topple.

Dickinson’s re-engineering of the heroic fantasy genre is not entirely successful. The Traitor Baru Cormorant has neither the heart stirring adventure of a heroic fantasy, or the political depth of a Wolf Hall. But in a field where too many writers simply retell the same old stories, Dickinson’s originality and ambition are to be applauded, even when he doesn’t quite manage to meet the narrative engineering challenges he has set in himself.

Good books keep the mechanics of storytelling opaque to readers. But good writers can’t resist cracking open old stories and re-engineering them for new audiences. Kameron Hurley has proved one of the most adept revisionists of fantasy in the modern genre. Her God’s War trilogy and Worldbreaker Saga both gender flip the “traditional” structures of the sci-fi and fantasy genres, and appeal in part to an audience of readers who love fantasy fiction, but laugh at the hackneyed gender roles the genre so often reinforces.

“Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert. Drunk, but no longer bleeding, she pushed into a smokey cantina just after dark and ordered a pinch of morphine and a whiskey chaser.”

Conservative pro-lifers might detest Nyx for taking control of her own body, but for a new generation of fantasy readers the opening lines of Hurley’s debut novel were a blast of fresh air in the stale atmosphere of genre fiction. Nyx isn’t a rolemodel character. Like Conan, she’s a violent psychopath whose heroic acts are driven by her own selfish ambitions. She’s wish fulfilment for people who want to crush their enemies and hear the lamentation of their husbands, and as that she works just fine.

The fantasy genre has always contained a progressive streak. From Angela Carter and Michael Moorcock to China Mieville and Kate Elliot, writers have re-engineered older narratives for audiences who don’t share the traditional values of Howard or Tolkien. But as the values of our society shift, those writers are creating the new mainstream of the genre. NK Jemisin’s Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings and
Ilana C Myer’s
Last Song Before Night, among many others, joy in re-engineering the traditional fantasy narrative to create new kinds of story.

Bookmarks is our new weekly email from the books team with our pick of the latest news, views and reviews, delivered to your inbox every Thursday

Read more

“See, this is the thing about history. His story. That’s all it is. The Old Man’s version of events, which basically the rest of us are supposed to accept as the undisputed truth. Well, call me cynical, but I’ve never been one to take things on trust, and I happen to know that history is nothing but spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. And what makes a hit or a myth, of course, is how that story is told, and by whom.”

The trickster god Loki, given voice by the expert pen of Joanne Harris, expresses why the freedom to re-engineer our stories is so important. Harris’s
The Gospel of Loki
is an escapist fantasy of a very different kind, one in which we can revel in the trickster’s power to break all of the old man’s rules. It’s no wonder that, as our society finally abandon’s the patriarchal values of the old men, we today find Loki such an appealing character. The old stories of myth, legend and fantasy were important ways of setting those values. Today they have become important ways of changing them.

To be fair Howard also gave us Red Sonya of Rogatino. Basically a female Conan. Is this any less progressive than Kameron Hurley's SF merc women?
The Traitor Baru Cormorant does look good though. I have added it to my must read list. The Gospel of Loki was allready on it. So many books so little time...

I don't recommend 'The Gospel of Loki' - big hype, very little to show for it. It's really just a retelling of the Edda from Loki's point of view, with the occasional bitchy 'secret' such as that the reason he was able to cut off Sif's hair was that he was cuckolding Thor at the time. You'd do better to get a good translation of the Norse myths and read the section 'Loki's Flyting' - all the venom, none of the woffle.

I think it says something interesting if the protagonists of novels have moved from being individualistic outsiders to being people who see themselves as being an integral part of the society in which they live, subject to the rules and regulations that are imposed upon them and having to work within those constraints. Readers of fantasy usually identify with the main character, so does that change reflect how people now see themselves in the real world in which they live? Do we feel less free, aspire to be less free or has fantasy just become less unrealistic?

I don't think that's the transition taking place. The characters are still outsiders, but now they play the system more. I think the identification now is with alternative ways of exerting power. Stealth over battle etc.

.. so what does that say about the nature of the threats we feel and the battles we want to see our escapist heroes fighting and winning on our behalf? We used to fear lawlessness and lack of civilisation; now we seem to fear dystopian society itself.

Am I the only one who reads fantasy for the fantasy? I want stirring adventure and heart pounding action. I want epic vistas and escapes that get my pulse racing. I couldn't care less about any of the books mentioned. I tend to lean very liberally on the political spectrum, so I empathize with the themes addressed here. However, I do that in real life. Know what I don't do? Slay dragons. Or sword fight. Or plunder tombs. That's what I want to read about.

"While Robert E Howard’s original Conan stories aren’t quite as good as the epic John Milius/Oliver Stone movie"

Respectfully disagree with this one. Milius' film has its merits and has some really excellent qualities, but Howard's best Conan stories are on another level entirely. They also have a great deal more subtlety than "crush your enemies, hear the lamentations of the women" stuff: "The Tower of the Elephant" has cosmic tragedy, "Queen of the Black Coast" has a torrid tale of love and loss, "The Hour of the Dragon" is suffused with Arthurian imagery.

It's also a bit strange to refer to Howard's work as having "traditional values": the pulps were fairly scandalous for the time period, and several of Howard's stories were rejected by the editors. One of Howard's stories that wasn't published in his lifetime was "Sword Woman," a story told from the first person perspective about a woman who rejects the patriarchal role of women in her family and goes off to be a soldier in Medieval France. She's neither a straw feminist, nor just a female Conan, but her own person. Other stories danced around taboo subjects like lesbianism, sentiments that could be perceived as anti-religious (the man was writing in rural Texas, mind), and were certainly a lot more detailed in their gore and sex than you might think.

Jacqueline Carey's
Kushiel's Legacy
trilogy would fit this rubric. The protagonist Phedre is not your typical fantasy heroine, being both a religious prostitute and a masochist. I know this sounds like we're straying into John Norman territory here but Phedre is a fully realised character who owns her own destiny and her story and the world she lives in are quite fascinating.

That's an interesting theory, Damien. I haven't read any of the books you discuss (although now I think I should), but I do like the idea that fantasy should be big enough to tell any type of story, not just stories of muscle-bound heroes, big armies, dark lords and chosen ones. Science fiction does seem to manage this rather better than fantasy, although of course people like Terry Pratchett or Robert Holdstock have long been telling a wider set of stories within fantasy.

A valiant attempt, and it would be great to read some genuinely successful fantasy told from different perspectives. But deconstruction of history as "his story" is simply cringeworthy, and reminds me of the people who claim that library in fact stands for "lie-brary" and that we should avoid those mendacious places (yes, those people actually do exist!).

Somewhat off-topic, but Gene Wolfe has just released a new novel Any chance we might get a review in the Guardian, or even an in-depth piece on his work similar to the excellent one on Ursula Le Guin by David Mitchell? He certainly deserves it!

History is not metaphor. It can be used that way -- see in the U.S. republican and right wing extremists -- but WWII is not a metaphor. History is a combination of real events that happened to real people. Some real people even made some history.

People who say such things as:

"I happen to know that history is nothing but spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. don't know the first thing about history."

don't know the first thing about historiography, primary documents, scholarship or even chronology.